Mistakes were made

Love and Freindship

The Jupiter Myth ended as it was always going to. This is the disadvantage of rereading books, mystery novels or otherwise: the usual narrative arc loses its impact completely. It did prompt me to look up Roman crossbows, which I hadn’t realised were a thing.

The next step in my continuous quest to pay as little as possible for reading material this year was Crossing Those Hills, the latest novella by Jon D Arthur, a person I follow on twitter who has been extraordinarily prolific lately and about whom I constantly feel guilty for not being able to support. In a strategy that I’ve seen elsewhere and highly approve of he is offering the first in his series free (and the sequels are not overly expensive either).

This particular series is set in a world which is post apocalyptic (at least, to our characters, who live in a bombed city, and who have to deal with monsters outside of it) and to others perfectly functional. It’s a nicely done dichotomy, even if confusing at first.

The book is written in first person, present tense, which also threw me; further I did something you should never really do which is read the first 20%, not read for a week due to a project (save for trashy romance novels of the kind that I don’t mention here), then finish the rest in a single sitting while waiting for some people to finish up a game of Terraforming Mars at boardgames night—this doesn’t help with remembering what’s going on, but I picked it up again quick.

I really liked the characters referred to as cupid and the envoy, who make great… paratagonists? I’m not sure how to describe them without giving too much away. Also—and this may seem odd—great traffic jam at the end. I really want to know how the story continues!

Unfortunately the terraformers weren’t done when I was, and I continued on to another book: the intentionally misspelled Love and Freindship by Jane Austen, which is one of a number of comedic short stories written by the teenaged Austen compiled on Project Gutenberg in a single volume with that title. It’s possibly not the best introduction to her work but I am definitely enjoying it. That being said I will have to read her other stuff to work out how much is serious and how much is a Parody of their Diction.